Tyrannical toilets and democratic baths

Why power-over as a default can only lead to oppression

This essay was originally posted here on the Soaring Twenties Social Club substack. I am reproducing it here. I hope you enjoy it and if so feel free to share it. Thanks, Tim.

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Upstairs the bath water is splashing, the bubbles are foaming and the two children are loudly holding court. Downstairs, sunk into the sofa cushions, I am reading an article sent to me by my colleague.

If you live in the UK it may have come across your radar that a number of schools have recently changed their policies around the use of toilets, and so during lesson time almost all toilets have been locked apart from a central block of toilets that are overlooked by a member of staff.

Young people, quite rightly, feel that their rights are being eroded, parents, quite rightly, are supportive of them, and this frustration has, in some schools, turned to anger and to protests. Young people are organising collectively and documenting their protests and sharing them via TikTok and the protests are spreading.

When I was at school twenty years ago if you needed the toilet you could, believe it or not, just go to the toilet, but, as it seems with everything in education, mainstream schools have been responding to potential problems with ever more draconian measures.

Sure, back then someone might have used going to the toilet as an excuse to bunk off for a bit, but there are always a plethora of solutions available to every problem. When I was training to be a secondary maths teacher three years ago the solution was that you could go to the toilet but you had to walk around with a timestamped hall pass and if you were seen wandering the school outside of your allocated time slot then a detention would be forthcoming.

You might think that it seems reasonable to give ten minutes to go to the toilet, you shouldn’t need more than that, however, when you attach processes to things to make them harder you have started down a path that sees them not as rights but as privileges, and privileges are easier to erode than rights. And so it was, the red hall pass system inevitably encouraged a hostile climate towards toilet breaks.

You would think the system was solely designed to solve the problem of stopping people from taking more than ten minutes, but the teacher I was understudy to wouldn’t let more than one person have a hall pass at a time. I still don’t know why; if you need the toilet you need the toilet. As much as British people love queuing, when I go to the urinals and there are free ones I don’t queue up behind someone until I am first in line; I want to meet my bodily needs so I just go.

Once when I was teaching and she was observing me from the back of the room I granted someone permission to go to the toilet straight after lunch, however, she intervened telling them that actually they couldn’t go as they should have gone at lunchtime. This is how the process of trying to manage young people’s rights leads to a hostile climate and the eventual erosion of those rights. Five minutes later she popped off to do some printing and I let anyone who needed the toilet go whilst she was away. There is no amount of Pythagoras that is more important than relieving yourself.

She is not alone though. It is starting from a belief that as adults you can manage young people’s bodily needs and therefore their toilet breaks that has led inevitably to a more authoritarian management solution of locking toilets during lessons time. But young people are not having it and are protesting in numbers as large as a couple of hundrend at a time.

The principal of a school in Northampton, in response to the recent protests said, “some parents have been arguing that it is an infringement of human rights for schools to restrict toilet use during lessons. That’s ludicrous.”¹

But young people and parents disagree, one described this image from their child’s school as like being in a prison and the image speaks for itself.

The principal goes on to explain how

He had a tipoff last weekend that some of his pupils were planning a protest, in part about the school telling pupils they could only use the toilet at break time. He said he decided “to take the bull by the horns”, confronting each of the secondary school year groups as they lined up in the playground first thing on Monday morning.

“I looked at them and said: ‘I know about this. Don’t do this.’ I said we would either suspend or potentially permanently exclude anyone who took part in a protest,” he said.

He reminded them that there were better channels through which to address their concerns, such as the student council or talking to their form teacher.

Reading this I wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake him and explain to him that people don’t protest unless they feel that the other avenues have been exhausted or are just not worth pursuing anyway. To say, they are protesting because they desperately want a voice and they feel that the voice they have is not able to be expressed and listened to. They are protesting as much about the fact that the student council is not an arena where their views will be given the credence that they believe they should as much as the policy change itself. Because if the student council worked effectively and they knew that it did they would go their first. They are protesting because you get to decide a drastic policy change that has a large impact on their experience whilst at school without consulting them, and then you stand up in front of them telling them they have to go through a slow processes to get that policy changed all the while threatening them with exclusion. They are protesting the power imbalances that all young people are keenly aware of that exist in schools, and your solution is not to acknowledge that and work with them but to double down on it hard.

Then my partner came downstairs and said that the commotion in the bath was because my two children were having an argument whilst getting in the bath and that my youngest, at just three years old, suggested to the seven year old, as a solution to their problems, “hey we could have a meeting. A bath meeting!”

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At the learning community I work at where children self-direct their learning meetings are one of the few formal structures we put in place to allow the community to function. It is how we plan out our week, check in with each other, set intentions and reflect on them, and discuss cultural changes.

As a three year old my youngest is an honourable member of the community. He is not bound by the agreements that everyone else is because he is too young to consent or understand them fully. But he, being a human, wants to join in and so he does. One of the agreements that we have is taking off your shoes as you go into the yurt, an agreement that he obliges and will patiently wait for someone to assist him if he needs help rather than just toddling in with his shoes on anyway.

Another agreement that we have is that meetings are mandatory to attend, and whilst he is not bound to attend, and could easily go off and play on his own, he will easily sit for half an hour, and does for most meetings, and join in. He already knows to put his hand up to talk, he sets intentions in the morning, and reflects and plans for tomorrow in the afternoon circle. Yes, he does these in the wrong place at times, but he is becoming fluent in the idea that there is a process to meetings, but most importantly that meetings are used to discuss things that multiple people feel strongly about and the process is there to allow us to come to a resolution; hence the idea for a bath meeting.

At the age of three he is understanding what it means to be a democratic citizen, one in which you have a voice worthy of being listened to, but others have voices that you need to hear to consider what their point of view is because then you can work together towards making sure everyone can get what they want, or at least be satisfied. We call this in our meetings good enough for now, safe enough to try.

In this format we might start thinking that people’s opinions are ludicrous, but we wouldn’t say it. We reserve judgement and try to be kind.

In meetings we don’t “take the bull by the horns”, active listening is key, this is a communal dance, not a bull fight.

Yes, sometimes they are long because there are two competing viewpoints that need to be brought together in agreement, that is what we mean by consent-based education, we look for solutions that everyone can consent to - good enough for now, safe enough to try - taking time to get to a satisfactory solution is more important than quickly obtaining a result so we can move on with our day.

We don’t have a playground but if we did we wouldn’t line people up to tell them what we adults think, we meet in a circle so everyone who wants to speak can be heard.

We use meetings to discuss things because the processes are a container for remaining calm. It defuses the situation of the bath problem momentarily as we have to pause and then converse, often taking it in turns, and in doing so that allows us to listen and hopefully stops us offering out threats which don’t move us towards a solution, unless we want to throw our weight around and enforce them through power dynamics.

Sometimes our meetings take a long time because sometimes young people find it hard to follow our agreements, but we never suspend or expel them from the meeting; we work with them. That might look like requesting a conversation after the meeting to reflect back how they were impacting the meeting but also what they found hard about it that led to that behaviour. We are always willingly learning from each other.

At three he is already learning these skills and their importance for meetings, relationships between people in community, and life itself - democracy even.

I suspect that if our friend from Northampton came along to one of our meetings we would be having quite a detailed chat after with him.

No, here you can’t tell the children that is a stupid idea, no, you can’t threaten the parents if you don’t like their attitude, no, you don’t get to tell them what to do, yes, you do have to listen to them, I know you want to go to your office to do paper work first thing in the morning and then have the token student council in the afternoon, but these kids are upset about this now so here we meet them where they are at, which is in a place where this needs solving so that is why we had a meeting about this now, and yes, it went on a long time because it was important to them and so it is important to us. Do you understand that now? How do you think you could do better next time? What support do you need from us to allow you to be in relation with young people in a way that is not rooted in power-over? Yes, it seems both to be extremely democratic and extremely laborious, direct democracy can often be both those things. Yes, you are right we do optimise for solutions, not efficiency.

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When you start down the path of self-directed education you notice two things. Young people self-directing their education is really about freedom; the freedom to learn what they want and at their own pace. And you notice that the reason this works is that learning is happening all the time.

But when you connect those two dots you notice that what we are actually talking about is freedom at all times. Freedom to learn what they want and how they want and when they want in all aspects of their lives, not just working their way through a maths curriculum at their own pace, but it is freedom to practice social-emotional learning in their own way, how to navigate their friendships, when to eat becomes learning to regulate their hunger drive, vegging out and watching TV all day becomes their decision, when to stand up for themselves and when to walk away, when to speak truth to power, and when to say I want my toilets back because enough of my rights have been taken away from me.

This doesn’t mean that freedom means that you can do whatever you want. Don’t let the bold italics fool you. Yes, regulating your hunger drive is important, but if someone has spent two hours cooking and is just about to serve dinner in ten minutes, having a snack might not be the best thing to do in that context, it might not make the person who has cooked for you feel appreciated.

Freedom doesn’t mean you can watch TV all day, not because we want to pass judgement on watching TV, sometimes it is fine to watch hours of it in a row, but you must remember the TV resides in a room of the house that is a scarce resource and other people might want to do their own activities in that space and for some things the TV can get in the way. You are free to do what you want, but how can we share the space together to meet everyone’s needs? Founder of Summerhill and pioneering radical educator A.S. Neill said famously, freedom not licence.

When Gary Lineker recently tweeted about immigration policy and was temporarily taken off air it was never about whether his tweet was abhorrent. As one commentator said he has freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences. Without getting into the politics and potential hypocrisy of the situation what was at stake was not what he said, but whether it was appropriate given the context of his role at the BBC and their impartiality laws.

Freedom not licence means exactly that, you have freedom up unto the point in which your claims to freedom no longer fit into the context that you reside in, the community you live in, the norms that bind the people you associate with; at that point pushing that freedom further will likely entail consequences.

And for us that consequence often means having a discussion and sometimes, if it affects enough people, another meeting. But having a process for discussion as equals is how people who want to reside together can get along together. It is the essence of democracy, and if a three year old can start to wrap their head around this I sit on the sofa and shake my head wondering why can’t a fully grown man who is meant to be considering how to create the environment in which thousands of teenagers can develop into democratic citizens, who when they leave his school will very soon be able to vote, can seemingly not.

When we talk of childism, the radical notion that children need to be treated as human beings, this wave of schools locking down toilets and banning young people from using them unless inside specific set hours is a prime example of how society fails young people in respecting their rights.

I have spoke of childism in enough contexts to know that often people find it jarring at first when you state that the way children are treated is oppressive. Most people believe the things adults do to children are for their own benefit and so that qualifies as non-oppression - it is a get out of jail free card letting adults off the hook. But the argument that it is ok because it is in their best interests was historically used against women: we don’t need to extend rights to women as husbands are acting in their best interest so it is fine. And we now look back on that with disbelief.

I have actually come to see my work with young people more and more as not one of education, as education is too narrow. Yes, learning happens all the time and we could do with broadening that notion out in society, however, connecting it to freedom is more and more where I reside nowadays and so I see myself as a child’s rights advocate as much as an educator.

When we say that children should have inalienable rights we are not plucking ideas out of the sky. We only have to lean on the UN Conventions of the Rights of the Child to see that essentially they have been granted the same rights as adults since 1989. Including the right to protest when their right to participate in decisions that affect them has not been adhered to.

One of the UNCRC’s General Principles is that children have the right to participate – and to be listened to – in all decisions that affect them. Participation rights are linked to children’s levels of maturity and apply accordingly. This is to support their development, but it also helps everyone achieve better-informed decisions. It strengthens society. Like adults, children have the right to voice their opinions and to peacefully protest.²

That teachers can’t recognise that children are human beings with rights enshrined in international law shows how far down the rabbit hole of power-over the mainstream education system has gone. And so if I could say one thing to my honourable friend from Northampton it is this: remember, members of a community, of children or of adults, never protest against too much democracy, but when they see tyranny on their doorstep.³

1. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/05/heads-uk-parents-pupil-protests-tiktok-stampedes-teachers-social-media

2. https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/child-rights/

3. This is not wholly true. The suffragettes and civil rights movements faced backlash and protests from white men as they perceived the extension of voting rights to previously denied members of the population was a dangerous and deranged idea. In a sense they saw it as tyranny at the door, once they can vote it will be hell in a handcart. But we know how that turned out, and in essence it was protests by an oppressor hoping to maintain the status quo. In this situation I think parallels can be drawn, whilst the teachers are not “protesting” they are taking to the media, using the weight of letters sent to parents, and holding assemblies to enforce through fear the status quo, and childism is an oppressive regime in all ways. For some that is hard to see in lots of circumstances, but I hope that, at least in this one, it is fairly obvious.